SOLVE INSUFFICIENT COMMUNICATIONS

A Measurement-method for Satisfied Communication in Business Organizations

Eldar Sultanow, Edzard Weber and Robert Lembcke

University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Str. 89, Potsdam, Germany

Keywords: Communication Management, Satisfied Communication, Global Business Organizations.

Abstract: Communication in widely distributed organizations is in many cases unsatisfactory. This contribution

presents a method, which enables scalability for satisfied communication in business organizations. This

method has been applied in practice and further evaluated by two IT-companies, which operate globally in

the field of Web Engineering, E-Commerce and Usability. In the course of the evaluation for a one-month

period, personnel were introduced to a checklist, which is specially designed for capturing communication

dissatisfaction. The findings within these two companies are alarming in several respects. Many

communication channels, which personnel choose by default, are inadequate and thus unacceptable for them

and for the respective communication partners.

1 INTRODUCTION

Experts often clash, not because of technical or

domain specific reasons, but because of the way they

communicate with each other, which may often end

in a dispute. A retrospective is a method (Kerth,

2001) for reflecting what happened during the last

project period and allows for ideas and suggestions

to improve project steps and processes that have

been passed. If discords and conflicts arise in this

period the project members talk these out and may

repair their relationships with each other (Rupp &

Steiner, 2009).

On one hand, not every company is in the habit

of conducting retrospectives. On the other hand, in

optimal circumstances, a retrospective should not

even be necessary because many of these conflicts

would not arise.

This contribution aims to give companies a

practical tool that identifies and solves the

aforementioned conflicts and communication

problems by way of prevention. A comprehensive

number of exemplary conflicts have been discovered

and classified in an empirical study, see (Sultanow,

Vladova, & Weber, 2009). Our research project to

develop a Measurement-Method for Satisfied

Communication in Business Organizations is an

exploration in reference analysis: we aim to

empirically collect data in one company for a one-

month period and to compare the results with data

collected in a comparable company for the same

period. The results thus far are promising; in both

companies we identified the use of improper and

deficient communication channels.

2 MEASUREMENT METHOD

DESIGN

In order to perform a measurement of

communication satisfaction within the given period

of one month, the roles are to be identified and the

checklist is to be designed with as much user-

friendliness as possible in order to ensure peak

efficiency.

2.1 Identifying Roles and Channels

Both IT companies, which have been investigated,

are distributed nationwide and both contain staff in

the following common roles: developer, marketing,

project manager. These delegates communicate

through well-established channels such as e-mail,

phone, face-2-face talk and chat. Other forms of

communication, such as videoconferencing, are not

currently being implemented.

The above mentioned roles and channels have been

identified by means of an interview with the

business executives taken in advance. The identified

367

Sultanow E., Weber E. and Lembcke R..

SOLVE INSUFFICIENT COMMUNICATIONS - A Measurement-method for Satisﬁed Communication in Business Organizations.

DOI: 10.5220/0003102403670371

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2010), pages 367-371

ISBN: 978-989-8425-30-0

 2010 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

roles and channels are relevant for designing the

checklist, where a contact maker contacts a contact

taker. If the contact maker’s attempt to get in touch

with the contact taker fails or the communication

between them is unsatisfactory from the view of the

contact maker, he makes a short annotation into his

checklist by checking his chosen communication

channel, the appropriate role of the person he

contacted and the reason of dissatisfaction. If the

contact taker perceives an attempt of a contact

maker’s contact as inconvenient/inadequate or the

contact taker is dissatisfied by the communication

initiated by the contact maker, the contact taker

annotates this in the checklist as same as done by the

contact maker as described above.

2.2 Design Checklists

As introduced in the previous section, a

communication requires at least two members, a

contact maker and a contact taker. Analogously, two

checklist types are designed, one for the contact

maker and another one for the contact taker.

Figure 2 shows the checklist, which is designed

for contact takers in an unsatisfied communication

situation. The structure of both checklists must allow

personnel to input quickly without spending a

disproportionate amount of time for understanding

what is meant and where to check correctly. For that

reason, pre-tests were performed to improve the

checklist’s efficiency.

Each checklist is self-explanatory. For an

unsatisfied communication case, the contact maker

indicates who he tried to contact, which channel he

used, the reason for dissatisfaction, the range to be

improved and the new attempt of contact including

its rating. The checklist for the contact taker is

similarly designed.

In checklist for contact takers, in the case of an

unsatisfied communication a contact taker indicates

on which channel who tried to contact him, why and

how he counteracted including a rating for his

counteraction.

3 EMPIRICAL INQUIRY

The empirical inquiry is performed in two mid-sized

IT companies each with approximately fifty

employees. The business profile of both companies

investigated can be summarized as follows:

 Company A develops an E-Commerce web

portal, which provides products, offers and

consumer information.

 Company B provides consulting in the manner of

Design Led Innovation and develops user

feedback driven solutions.

Personnel situated in key roles, such as developers,

marketing professionals and project managers, are

introduced into the inquiry and trained for the usage

of the checklists, which have been designed for this

inquiry.

Before starting the inquiry, both checklists – the

one for contact makers and the other one for contact

takers have been evaluated during a pre-test. During

this pre-test staff members are requested to annotate

exemplary hypothetical situations within the

checklist. For example a marketing employee was

given following imaginary situation:

“You tried to contact a developer by phone in order

to ask for an estimated development time for a new

module planned for sale. The developer didn’t pick

up the phone and you went into his office for giving

your question in a face-2-face talk”.

For a month period the staff member filled out the

checklist, during the first week at each end of the

day feedback dialogs where performed in order to

ensure that the checklist was accurately used and not

forgotten in moments when they are to be used.

After this period, Company A collected from

their personnel 79 checklists from contact makers

and 62 from contact takers. Company B collected

145 checklists from contact makers and 142 from

contact takers.

This data collected forms the basis for the

analysis given by the next section.

4 DATA ANALYSIS

The data analysis consists of three parts. First there

is a descriptive analysis of each company separately.

Another part is the network analysis of each

company. And finally there is the comparison of a

company with another particular company or a set of

companies.

4.1 Descriptive SPSS Report

The descriptive analysis was done with the statistic

application SPSS. Due to the fact that the collected

data is collected anonymously it is not possible to

join/merge the two databases based on different

checklists. The checklists only ask for the role of the

communication partner but not for his identity. But

each database still enables a various kind of analysis.

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368

The checklist “Somebody tried to contact me” gives

an insight into the view of receivers on dissatisfying

communication (see Table 1).

Table 1: “Somebody tried to contact me.”

Addressed problem

1 How often and which communication channels

are subject to a dissatisfying communication

(overall; per role)?

2 What are the reasons for counter action (overall;

per role)?

3 What is the frequency of different kinds of

counter actions?

4 Which counter action is preferred to react on

dissatisfying communication using which

channel?

5 What is the frequency of dissatisfying

communication between the different roles of

contact maker and contact taker?

6 Which communication channel causes the most

trouble for a particular role of the contact taker?

7 How is the applied counter action rated?

8 How often and which communication channels

are subject to a dissatisfying communication

(overall; per role)?

Figure 1 shows the results of the question “Which

counter action is preferred to react on dissatisfying

communication using which channel?” As you can

see, in both companies the employees documented

dissatisfying communication by phone, e-mail, chat

or face-to-face-talk. But the reaction and the

executed counter actions are completely different.

The members of Company A (Figure 1a) prefer to

ignore untimely or inconvenient communication

requests or place them on hold. Members of

Company B (Figure 1b) choose more intensive the

alternative of forwarding communication requests to

a project manager. In this case the project manager

is able to recognize the occurring communication

overflow of its project members and he is able to

satisfy the communication resp. information request

without delay. After having a deeper view on

company B we observed that the company made

some organizational rule: In the past the developer

had been contacted by other departments frequently

and the work rhythm was interrupted each time.

Therefore the project manager has acquired the

responsibility to be the first contact point for

technical request of non-developers. The descriptive

analysis (Figure 1b) shows that the learning process

is still in progress. Not all employees are ready to

contact the project manager first, but the developer

already makes use of that service. They forward the

technical request to the project manager and he will

answer or preselect the requests without disturbing

the development. A future snapshot in this company

will show if this service has been accepted by the

non-development departments.

Figure 1a: “Somebody tried to contact me”:

Communication channel crossed by counter action

(Company A).

Figure 1b: “Somebody tried to contact me”:

Communication channel crossed by counter action

(Company B).

The other point of view is the one of the contact

maker. All results, however, cannot speak for

themselves. They have to be interpreted by someone

who knows the enterprise. Maybe the organizational

behavior differs from other organizations because of

very special institutions, e.g. workflow organization

vs. self-organization. Based on the primary result it

is possible to see that something in the organization

is different, but without an expert view it is not clear

whether it is a symptom of something good or bad.

4.2 Social Network Analysis

(SNA) Report

The different SNA values for the investigated

example are listed in Table 2. In this example

indegree, outdegree, degree centrality, closeness

centrality and prestige are analyzed.

SOLVE INSUFFICIENT COMMUNICATIONS - A Measurement-method for Satisfied Communication in Business

Organizations

369

Figure 2: Checklist for contact takers.

Table 2: SNA values for the investigated example.

Role

Degree

Out

Degree

Centrality

Closeness

Centrality

Prestige

Consultant

4 4 0.5714 0.77 0.5714

Marketing

3 6 0.8571 1.4 0.4286

Developer

3 4 0.5714 1 0.4286

Project

Manager

4 0 0 0 0.5714

Customer

3 0 0 0 0.4286

Employee

Group

1 0 0 0 0.1429

Misc.

0 0 0 0 0

Business

Executive

0 4 0.5714 0.875 0

5 RÉSUMÉ

In the case of the first company, which has been

investigated, the results can be interpreted as a

performance of success; namely, the communication

between IT and other departments including

marketing etc. has been mediated by introducing a

special role. So it is not to be negatively interpreted,

that contact makers are delivered to a dedicated

person, which communicates between them. It

shows a kind of organizational learning: the use of a

mediator between different departments. A direct

communication was previously overloaded.

6 FUTURE WORK

The results of the comparative analysis becomes

better the bigger the database is. As databases

expand it will be possible to make much more

specific comparisons, e.g. organizations of the same

size, business branch, and communication structure

or role distribution. It will be possible to make an

analysis for particular roles independently from their

organizational affiliation.

The biggest challenge is to make data collecting

efficient. At the moment every dissatisfied

communication event has to be reported manually by

paper and pen. Data is collected manually and

therefore the proposed method does not scale. But

this offline tool has been chosen because of its

independence of PC accessibility. Even a mobile

device would be too inconvenient. The perfect

solution would offer different ways for reporting but

must still guarantee anonymity.

Whenever possible, the analysis has to take

advantage of automatic data collection, for example

by analyzing log files, always guaranteeing the

privacy of the employees. Only then will it become

possible to create reports in time and to offer

individual communication profiles. These individual

reports will only be posted to the specific user. This

might be a personal outer distant signal. The user

has an empirical indication that his communication

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behavior is “very special” and might be the cause for

some communication problems in the past.

REFERENCES

Kerth, N. L., 2001. Project Retrospectives: A Handbook

for Team Reviews, Dorset House Publishing Co., Inc.

Rupp, C., Steiner, A. N., 2009. Projektretrospektiven, Part

1: Nutzen und Vorbereitung. Projekt Magazin, Vol.

2009-19.

Sultanow, E., Vladova, G., Weber, E., 2009. Overcoming

Communication Barriers for CMC in Enterprises. In

Proceedings of 15th Americas Conference on

Information Systems.

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